Escape

Escape – Psychological Short Story

“So, when are you giving us good news?” Cheerful.

“When are we going to taste your wedding feast?” Sarcastic.

“When are you planning to settle down? There is somebody no?” Gossipy.

“How long do you intend to remain like this?” Pseudo Angry.

“All your friends are settled, what about you?” Condescending.

“Get married soon yaar… what are you waiting for” Friendly.

“Hello… do you realize how old you are?” Authoritative.

“Tick Tock….Tick Tock… isn’t the clock ticking inside like a time bomb? What the hell are you waiting for?” Medical Experts.

The questions never stopped.

 

Shut the f**k up and mind your own business. She wanted to scream to everyone who asked her this.

But she always forced a smile.

“Soon”.

 

At home, her parents silently pleaded with her to atleast elope with someone. We will not oppose or disown you. Don’t worry. We can handle those questions easily.

The Why and When questions, they are difficult.

“Has no one proposed?” her mother had asked helplessly.

They scanned the Hindu Classifieds every Sunday as a duty, knowing very well that there would be nothing inside those four pages of tiny print.

“We don’t know anything about computers, but they say there are possibilities on the internet….” The words hung in the air, begging her to take initiative.

But she knew it was futile. The Hindu, the internet and everything else.

That was almost two years ago.

She had stopped going to her hometown now. Her mind found some rest since then, not having to answer the endless stream of the same questions over and over again with the same answer, same smile and same helpless palpitation in her heart. Not having to see the silent frustration in her parents’ eyes.

 

Gurgaon had been far enough place to escape from Them. To Anonymity.

But she found no escape from Herself.

And then no escape from the Bitch.

The Bitch had been friendly at first, making small talk, sarcastically passing comments on everyone else whispering one liners, making her smile to herself every now and then. She didn’t welcome The Bitch into her life, but didn’t avoid her either. She needed someone to talk to. There was no one else. And in the beginning they both had some fun together.

But one night The Bitch had climbed into her bed, climbed into her head and started to chant. The chanting was in gibberish, but in the depths of slumber somehow they made total sense. They were angry curses. Prophecies of her impending doom.

She tried to open her eyes, but The Bitch held them shut. She tried to wave her arms to chase her away, but The Bitch paralyzed her.  She felt like she was thrashing wildly, tearing away at the mattress and at The Bitch’s hair. But she had not moved even an inch. She was crucified to the mattress. She couldn’t breathe. The chanting became louder and louder.

A Hail Mary that Sister Alphonse had taught her in sixth standard involuntarily came to her lips. But The Bitch shut both her lips and her brain. Hail Mary full of….She forgot the rest and helplessly tried to cry out an easier chant desperately seeking help from any religion. Nothing came to her rescue. She and The Bitch wrestled for hours. The Bitch won.

By three am The Bitch had gone back to sleep, tired and victorious. But she lay awake, drenched in sweat, eyelids pried open at last, but refusing to shut now.

The visits continued every night. The wrestling matches continued. The chanting and the shouting continued. The Bitch always won.

 

The chemist had raised an eyebrow and looked at her questioningly when she asked for them. She handed over another hundred rupees silently. But he would give her only seven at a time he had said. For a week. Hanging on to a gossamer thread of ethics, convincing his conscience.

She took the pills after supper. They worked. The Bitch was running scared. She stopped visiting at night. But there was no respite during the days. The sneaky trips into her brain continued.

She didn’t know which had started first. The onset of the symptoms or her reading about the symptoms. But each time Google threw up the words, The Bitch whispered “That’s you they have written about” And she laughed.

Clinical Depression.

BPD.

Anhedonia.

Six months ago she had tried to escape from The Bitch and moved to Mumbai. She couldn’t find her in a new city. She could escape into further anonymity in the bursting population. The hiding places were endless. She didn’t inform anyone when she left her job in Gurgaon. It made no difference anyway. It was the same work and the same life she was going to have. There was nothing new to say. And there was no one to say it to. So she just drifted on.

Her mobile bill lay on the table. Call charges: Nil.

Only the telemarketers called her these days. Sometimes, out of sheer loneliness she listened intently to the enthusiastic girls and boys selling insurance policies and personal loans. There was a twinge of sadistic pleasure that she enjoyed when she got their hopes up before shooting them down with a curt reply in the end. All those young boys and girls had other things in their lives that she didn’t have. So she felt no guilt.

It was not a conscious decision to phase everyone out of her life. But it just happened. Her old acquaintances used to call her almost every week when she shifted to Gurgaon, filling her with the latest gossip and tit-bits. Initially she had something to discuss with them. The new office, the weather, the food, her manager, her colleagues.

After three months the office was not new anymore, the weather was the same, the food remained horrible and her manager here too had said the same thing to her.” You are an excellent worker, but not a team player.” She had looked back at him with the same empty, dead eyes and nodded.

The new colleagues had remained colleagues. Never became her friends. They were all too young and full of life. They were like cotton candy clouds on a clear summer day. She was the black thundercloud that rendered people homeless every year.

She stayed away, not wishing to spread her poison into their lives.

Soon, the “So what’s news there?” questions from the old acquaintances had no answers.

“I wake up. I go to work. I come back home. I have my food. I sleep.” She couldn’t tell them that. So she just stopped answering their calls.

For a while they thought she was too busy, or too proud. And then they had all stopped calling.

“Now, I take a pill and then I sleep. That is something new these days.”

She could have called all of them to convey this news. But she didn’t.

She felt guilty each time she thought about her parents. But with them too she had nothing to say.

“How are you?”

“We are fine”

“Are you taking your medicines?”

“Yes, we are taking our medicines”

“Do you want money?”

“No, we don’t want money. We cannot take money from a daughter. We have enough”

She knew the answers and the questions.

And so she had stopped calling them.

 

The million small emotions that swept over her over the past two years had suddenly snowballed into an avalanche.

When she got off the plane in Mumbai airport, for a moment a wave of hope swept over her.

Maybe, life would begin.

“Life? Yessss… it is waiting for you here… it is standing near the parking lot holding up a board with your name written….Ha…” The Bitch laughed, standing behind her at the baggage aisle.

She had followed her here too. Fear filled the very depths of her soul. She wanted to turn back and run. But she knew she had no escape. She pushed the trolley with all her energy, running, hoping to lose the grinning shadow walking beside her, mumbling in her head again.

 

She didn’t want to rent out a whole apartment in Mumbai. She couldn’t bear the sound of the silence echoing from the walls again. So she sublet the twelve by twelve room with a separate entrance on the sixth floor. It was part of an apartment that belonged to an elderly couple.

“No parties, no friends over and absolutely no men.”

Those were the rules the old lady laid down before renting out the room to her.

“The previous girl who stayed here vanished one day; probably eloped with that man who used to visit. I don’t care about your private life, but I don’t want to answer any questions later. So no men.”

“Parties, friends, men? In your life? That is exactly what your life is all about… tell the old fool that…Tell her… Ha…” The Bitch inside her head had laughed sadistically.

She nodded silently in agreement to the old woman’s rules and handed over the advance and moved in.

 

She had just finished her eyebrows and a facial and the girl was pressing a strip of cloth on her arms, ready to tug out the tiny hairs helplessly trapped inside the sweet sticky warm wax.

“Facial, eyebrows and now smooth hands? What next? A Brazilian bikini wax? Ha…” it was the Bitch inside her head again. “What for?” she hissed loudly. And laughed.

The next month onwards she stopped going to the beauty parlour.

The cruel Bitch was right. What for?

 

She checked her savings bank account balance. In lakhs?

“Of course,” she thought to herself. “Rent, two meals and taxi fare. What other expenses do I have?” Her parents would return the money if she sent it to them. She couldn’t care less about any orphan children pleading for her help, popping up in random websites with bright smiles and their life’s sad stories.

She was about to click on the option to transfer the amount to a fixed deposit for a year. “Ha…And then what? It is going to land right back into the same account after a year? What are you going to do then? Spend it on your wedding? And honeymoon?” It was the sarcastic cruel Bitch again.

She logged out of the site.

 

She sat in her fifth floor cubicle, B2N13. The figures in the screen in front of her danced. The disembodied fingers all around her were tapping away on the keyboards. Fattened and sleepy after lunch. The silence went up a few decibels, drowning out the sound. Tap…Tap…Tap.

She pulled out her headphones and plugged them into her ears. There was no joy in the music, but it would help to block out the deafening silence that was becoming louder and louder around her. This office too was a mausoleum. Just like the others. She had to run again.

The three floors above her suddenly crumbled like a house of cards. The four floors below her collapsed under the weight. She was sinking, gasping for breath.

Sweat bathed her armpits and her back stuck to the chair. She swiveled around helplessly. Trapped.

She looked around in fear.

Tap…Tap…Tap… the fingers were at work. They had to keep tapping for another four hours.

She tore herself out of the chair and rushed down the stairs, two at a time. The noise in her head hammered against her skull. The Bitch was screaming. Singing loudly. She had switched on the strobe lights and started dancing inside her head now.

She rushed outside and stood, on the well manicured bright green lawn, next to a pretentious sculpture and a gushing fountain. Genetically engineered flowers smiled obscenely around her. Bright and colourful. Like they stepped out of a five year old’s painting.  She tried to breathe. The security guards in the blue hats walked around in the warm sunshine and stared at her curiously. No one came up to ask her if everything was alright.

She looked up. The eight floors were standing erect, laughing at her. The Bitch suddenly had a face. Thousands of faces grinned at her out of each floor. The fingers had detached themselves from the bodies and keyboards and were tapping against the huge glass windows now. Tap…Tap…Tap.

 

She gave her resignation that evening and stopped going to work the next day. The company deactivated her access card and settled her dues. A new joinee who was waiting in the wings breathlessly for a vacant workstation swooped in like a vulture the next day. B2N13. The fingers on the keyboard changed.

Tap…Tap…Tap.

The sounds didn’t.

The calendar on the wall was still in October. Days and dates made no difference now. It was the end of November, almost a month since she had quit. She made no effort to find another job. It would all be the same.

Tap…Tap…Tap.

Her inbox was filling up with special holiday offers from airlines. Cash back offers from banks. EMI offers on credit cards. Take a family holiday today; pay back for the next year.

Hotel discount offers. Five days, Four nights. On Twin Sharing Basis.

People had started to make plans for the Holiday season already.

“What are your plans dahling? Partying with friends? Or with your boyyyyfriend?” The Bitch asked in a surprisingly friendly voice.

Suddenly the room felt like an oven. She slammed the laptop shut and got out of bed. Dinner wouldn’t be delivered for another two hours. She wanted some air. She locked the door and climbed down the stairs.

What’s the hurry? Why take the lift?

One, two, three… she counted each stair absentmindedly. There was nothing else her mind could think of. She had to keep The Bitch out somehow.

She lost count by the time she reached the third floor, so she began counting again, this time folding out her fingers like she learnt in LKG.

The evening was a bit sultry. The sky was deep grey. Colorless

She walked out of the apartment complex’s gates and took a right turn. She didn’t know where it led, but she didn’t know where she was going anyway.

She had no thoughts these days; even memories were getting erased slowly. It was like a new blanket of snow falling every day, wiping out even the few footprints from the previous day.

She read the signs on the way and repeated them in her mind. She counted the cars and read the registration numbers as they zipped past.

Maruti, Santro, Santro, Santro, Maruti.

Her stomach rumbled when she passed a roadside food stall. Buy me something, I’m starving, it cried out to and the juices inside began to bubble in anticipation. “Later” she answered, irritated, and continued to walk. Her stomach rumbled an angry reply and the juices settled back, disappointed. Like flat Coke.

She didn’t know how long she had walked. It could have been hours, or minutes or seconds. But she continued to walk.

She felt a small stone inside her slippers; she stopped and shook it off.

Her legs cried out to her. We are tired. We want to go back home.

A few feet ahead there was a taxi parked.

“I will walk upto that taxi and then turn back”, she told her feet and walked on.

She stood behind the taxi paused for a moment. Her feet heaved a sigh of relief, smiled and thanked her as she did an about turn. She started to walk back.

Suddenly there was an earth shattering noise.

And then silence.

“… including an unidentified woman.” The anchor on the news channel gravely reported a few hours later, pausing dramatically as the gory visuals flashed across the TV screens all over the country.

Unidentified female. Aged around 35.

That is how it was recorded in the police reports in the next few weeks.

“We can add a name and address and share the compensation”, someone suggested later.

 

“Oh god…No one will know”.

That had been her last thought as the metal tore through her body, tearing it into a thousand pieces.

“Yeah, like it makes any difference if anybody knows…..Is someone going to build a Taj Mahal?…Ha…” The cruel Bitch shouted to her, trying to be heard as she melted into the flames. She had to have the last word.

END